force of our enemy, seemed to make success ungrateful, and defeat ruinous. This was one of those moments on which the fates of ages turn. The outcry of the multitude was for submission; and it was echoed in Parliament by those who could discover nothing but stainless honour and irresistible talents in the enemy of England.

Submission would, for the time, have relieved the Prince Regent of the whole burthen which pressed upon his throne. But it would have eventually crushed all that belonged to the hope of freedomn in Europe. An unpurposed, or an ungenerous spirit on the British throne at that hour, might have decided the ruin of the Continent with a dash of the pen. The Liberties of the World had then but one neck; and the sword, either to smite or to save, was in the hand of the Sovereign of England. We might at that time have purchased, with perfect facility, such peace as could have been made with France. We had but to sacrifice the Peninsula, and the offering and the treaty would have been made on the same altar.

France, repelled in negociation, resolved to overwhelm us by war. Another trial of the firmness of the Prince Regent's administration was at hand. The wrath of France, exceeding all that had ever been felt of hostility, was now to be executed by a force exceeding all that had ever been known of military strength. Napoleon had from the commencement looked upon England as almost the only enemy; as if the miseries of the nations whom he bowed to a yoke of iron, had not raised deathless hostility to his throne in the heart of every people. But England was the great antagonist. He found her wherever the battle was to be fought for innocence and freedom, against bloody, remorseless, godless usurpation. She followed him like a conscience. Her spirit was perpetually on the wing, above his march, like the eagles on the track of an army, predicting the hour when they should feed on the pomp below. While England lived, he felt all his conquests inse care; and it was the whole scope of his policy to throw a weight of war upon England, which would trample her soil till it was incapable of giving nutriment to the minutest flying seed of Freedom. She had resisted him to his astonishment, and that of the world. VOL. VIII.

He had seen her growing with his growth,-ascending to a nobler height of rivalry with every fresh accession of his power. From whatever quarter of Europe he looked, she was in his horizon like a mountain, flinging her shadow upon his conquests. The farther his disastrous splendour was shot, the farther following with her mighty obscuration.

Napoleon's fame and his ambition called for the unequalled effort of France; and it was made with a violence and wild magnificence of physical force, the most rapid, extended, and overwhelming that the world had ever seen. The beginning of the year 1812 was a period of the deepest anxiety felt by the Civilized World since the irruption of the Barbarians into the Roman Empire. Gallant things were said and thought,-brave men knew that they could not die unrevenged,-good men looked to Providence, and consoled themselves with the conviction that the triumph of rapine and irreligion could not last for ever: But the holiest and noblest feeling was shaded by the belief that it must yet have to fight the fight of despair.

This sentiment did not depress the exertions of the Empire. Ancient heroism had nothing in its annals more lofty than the unostentatious fortitude of the English heart in that trying hour. The Spartan leader, in all the excitement of public glory, in the shout and gaze of surrounding nations, did not hear of the coming of the PERSIAN with a more solemn fortitude, than the man of England, when he took up his arms, and repaired to his solitary post, and devoted himself to final battle.

The armament of France was wor

thy of a genius bound to work the world's woe. Europe was converted into one great arsenal; all the energies of human life were seen turned to the means of its destruction. From the Channel to the l'istula, every road was covered with armies passing and repassing-every river was chonked with ships turned from the supply of nations to the transport of the materials of war-every cottage was visited for the devotement of a new soldier and a new victim to the ambition which had already violated its property and its freedom. For a time it was unknown what empire this gigantic devastation was to cover with rui. Darkness was about the throne of France. The proximis 4 S

of England made all the menace audible. In the stillness of a juncture that had the gloom of midnight without its tranquility, the Englishman on his shore could hear the "hum of the camp," the " armourers furnishing the knights," the whole dreadful note of preparation for the morn. There was no strength in man to impede that preparation. While the storm gathered up its materials of havoc, and hung above human reach, compounding, mingling, deepening its volumes, and sending out at intervals a voice of mysterious menace round the horizon, Europe lay beneath in silence, and expecting on what quarter the final and capricious ruin might be flung. It rushed down in flame.

It will yet be among the proofs of England's glory and prowess, vilified as they are by the opponents of her Government, even among ourselves, that Napoleon felt to the utmost their solidity and grandeur. She was the only antagonist whom he did not dare to attack in front. He had before shrank from the armed form of the nation, after gazing on it at the head of all the force of France; and he returned from his baffled warfare like Caligula, with only the weedy trophies of his own sea-shore. But all his warfare was against England. Her conquest would be the final subjection of the world; and to conquer her he ranged the world. He attacked her outwork as far as Russia. This is not the place to detail a warfare, to which history will yet look as one of the sublimest demonstrations of the providence of the God of Battles. We know the moral. When human valour could do no more, a mightier strength interposed and fought the fight alone, and with the weapons of his winter, the storm and the snow, smote the pride of the blasphemer.

The force of France was now put beyond the power of universal conquest. But there was still in the indefatigable treachery, and reckless ambition of its nature, serious exercise for courage and decision in the defence of Europe. It is enough to say, that Europe has been saved. The eye that had looked upon the world in 1812, would recognize in its tranquillity at this day, nothing less than the workings of an efficient wisdom, under the influence of a favouring Providence. Something like an anticipation of that glorious period to which prophecy has looked for the first

triumph of good. The trumpet heard no more in our border-thesword beaten into the ploughshare-the seas covered with fearless wealth, and become the great undisturbed highway of the world-the minds of men turning to the arts of a happy civilization-the inhabitants of the earth sitting under their own vines and fig-trees-the knowledge of religion spread, by a ho ly zeal, to the shores and desarts that scarcely even the ardour of gain had visited-the slight tumults of the world all conveying to the one central and splendid point of secure tranquillitynation no longer at the mercy of nation

war dying-conquest dead. Are we to suppose that those stupendous benefits have been spontaneous-that they have come with the winds of heaven? or, are we not rather, when we see this stately tree, that from England projects its fertility and its shade over the world, to consult the common course of nature, and ask by whose hands it has been planted and watered? It is not the purpose of these pages to offer adulation to the King, but to pay him the honourable tribute of justice. They have looked upon him as a public being. At a future time they may turn to those circumstances of personal conduct from which the generosity and British feeling of his government might have been anticipated. But the whole experience of nations proves, that where there is a course of decided success, there cannot be a counteracting feebleness in the government. If the members of Administration have been men of ability, is there no honour due to the choice which selected them from the crowd of competitorship?

Late events have brought forward the Monarch more distinctly from his servants, than is the custom of England. But have they not so far tended to his honourable distinction? Is there a doubt still clinging to the mind of any rational man, that the public were imposed on by the basest fabrications, for the most dangerous purposes? The national disturbance is now at rest. It served the objects of faction for a moment; but the stream, with all its load of offence, has sunk, and left, naked and loathsome to the sense, all that it had buoyed up on its sudden and squalid flowings. The King has appeared before his people, and they have shewn that they honour him. But History must be the giver of his most perma

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